How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)

What It Covers

Albert Cheng, growth leader at Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com, shares his explore-and-exploit framework for finding growth opportunities, biggest monetization wins including Grammarly's freemium sampling strategy that doubled upgrade rates, and experimentation best practices.

Key Questions Answered

• •Explore and Exploit Framework: Find winning experiments then systematically expand learnings across the product. When Chess.com discovered users prefer reviewing wins over losses, they made game review 25% more positive, growing reviews by 25% and subscriptions by 20%, then applied positivity patterns to adjacent features like puzzles and challenges.
• •Freemium Sampling Strategy: Grammarly doubled upgrade rates by interspersing paid suggestions among free ones instead of only showing spelling and grammar corrections. This counterintuitive approach gave free users a taste of premium features without cannibalizing paid conversions, demonstrating the product's full value proposition beyond basic correctness.
• •Experimentation Volume Targets: Chess.com went from zero experiments to targeting 1000 annually by enabling no-code testing, expanding experiments beyond product to lifecycle marketing, App Store optimization, and content. The goal itself matters less than conversations about what infrastructure and cultural changes enable that velocity.
• •Current User Retention Priority: For daily-use products, existing user retention compounds far more than new user acquisition. Duolingo found 80% of daily active users are current or resurrected users, not new signups. Day one retention of 30-40% indicates product-market fit for consumer apps with sufficient frequency and scale.
• •AI-Powered Analysis Tools: Text-to-SQL Slack bots answer ad-hoc data questions instantly without analyst bottlenecks, dramatically increasing company-wide data literacy. This removes embarrassment barriers that prevent people from asking questions, creating an explosion of inquiry that surfaces hidden insights and accelerates learning cycles across growth teams.